High school senior Carrie Courogen has written a nice article about censorship in schools. Brings me back to the halcyon days of mine own high school journalism career, when I too was a firebreathing anti-censorship advocate.

Fiji’s military government is repressing speech. Newspapers and other media outlets have come up with some interesting ways to deal with the censorship:

The Fiji Times has run blank pages with the sentence: “the stories on this page could not be published due to Government restrictions” while the Fiji Daily Post ran a story about a man getting on a bus and another watching paint drying on Wednesday.

Interesting feature article on how public school administrators are quick to censor student speech.

David Bulla, a journalism professor at Iowa State University and a veteran researcher in the area of high school journalism, noted that principals do not fully support the First Amendment. “Paradoxically,” he said, “the majority of principals believe the government should not interfere with newspapers outside the high school. Thus, the notion of freedom of the press is largely abstract for high school administrators. That is, it applies outside their schools, but not within.”

In October 2008, the Anti-Defamation League polled 1000 Americans on their views about religion, morality, Hollywood, and other related subjects.

The poll showed that

Nearly 40 percent of the American people support the notion that “dangerous ideas should be banned from public school libraries,” and nearly the same number of Americans disagree with the statement that “censoring books is an old-fashioned idea.”